How to make a drama from repressed emotions and genteelly-expressed opposition is a challenge, especially in such a large theatre. One answer to the staging problems presented by Mansfield Park may well be to heed Willy Russell’s Rita’s advice and ‘Do it on the radio.’


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Regeneration commences Pat Barker’s lauded First World War trilogy, dramatising a real-life encounter between the poet Siegfried Sassoon and WHR Rivers, an anthropologist,neurologist and psychologist working with shell-shocked soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital. In July 1917, Sassoon, an army officer, has published a declaration on the injustice of the continuance of the war and is refusing to return to the front. Partly to avoid the negative publicity that might arise from his being court-martialled – and presumably shot – for disobeying an order, he is sent to Rivers for treatment. Over the ensuing months, both men come to change their positions in relation to the Declaration and their respective roles in the conduct of the war. In a parallel process over 250 pages, readers are challenged to consider their positions, not only in relation to war, but also about the ethics of psychological and psychiatric intervention that stifles protest by enabling people to function in an insane world.

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I’m not someone who goes out armed with a notebook and pencil, ready to snatch snippets of dialogue from an innocent public. It’s not so much, that like Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, I’ve had people challenge the real-life stuff as unbelievable, or that I’d draw the line at stealing for the sake of my art.

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Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin my story of how I helped bring an Indian elephant into the English countryside and learnt something about storytelling in the process.

Once upon a time Chamu told me about a guided walk she was planning in the Peak District. The aim was to use story to promote diversity within the national park and the walk would be integrated with the local celebrations for birthday of the Hindu god, Ganesh. Well, I thought, what could be better than walking and storytelling? I jumped at the chance to help out.

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... you put one thing in an essay - your agent says another thing in passing - you remember one of the lives you nearly chose to follow in one of those yellow-wood moments before you decided for something else; your agent says a second thing because of what you said; you remember one of the things you most loved when you were ten; you realise that another childhood love was a place which has been knocking on the doors of your brain for a couple of years now ...

- and you have an idea - the first idea for months - perhaps a year or two (it's astonishing how teaching and parenting and a novel that won't work suck up your creative brain) ...

- it's not a short story idea -

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It's hardly ever easy receiving rejection letters or slips from publishers, agents or anyone at all - but we can choose different ways to react to them. Some ways are more helpful than others.

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I was dozing in bed the other morning, wondering whether to get up or go back to sleep, when I started thinking about my friend Maeve. Next thing I knew, I was Maeve, and Maeve was thinking There’s no cheese left. The revelation came to her with a slight pause before the word left, which began to reverberate in capital letters. Through Maeve’s eyes, I could even see the non-existent cheese, except that – brace yourselves Male Readers – it was actually a sanitary towel. (You might be relieved to know the ST was unused.)

I’m sure we’ve all experienced strange thoughts and sensations between sleep and wakefulness, but mine aren’t usually this bizarre. For many of us the hypnagogic state is especially creative, when the best ideas are forthcoming and an impasse in our writing gets miraculously resolved. But how could I use this? I’m not writing magical realism or sanpro ads.

But I had been struggling to find inspiration for a blog post to accompany the publication of my new story, Winnie the Pooh’s Danse Macabre. I wanted – want – to write about writing about hallucinatory states of mind. In that context, Maeve was a gift.

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The big, Tony-winning hits of the broadway writer Maury Yesten are at opposite ends of the scale: Nine, which works beautifully as a chamber opera, and the vast Titanic. So my ear was caught, the other day, when I heard him talking about the difference. Clearly he doesn't scorn the dancing sets and known movie story (Nine is based on Fellini's 8˝). Nor does he reject the need to appeal to non-English-speaking tourists (the economic lifeblood of Broadway as it is of the West End). After all, spectacle has been part of the theatre ever since theatre existed, and I've no doubt that the first time an Ancient Greek director decided to use a real props, or - gasp! - a third actor, or a bigger chorus, the purists were muttering into their retsina that civilisation was doomed.

But, as Yestin said of Nine, "You just have one character who says to the other, 'Why did you bring me to this beach?', and you've saved yourself $250,000 of sand."

Lucky us prose-writers, on the other hand: we never need to spend a quarter of a million of anything - except possibly coffee and brain-cells - on our writing.

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This is the last of of three Highly Commended entries to the This Itch of Writing 500th Postiversary Competition. I liked this post because it made me laugh and it's probably more true - though arguably less detailedly helpful - than all the other competition posts put together with the rest of the whole darned more-than-six-years' worth of This Itch of Writing. Having said that, if you want to bag yourself a Highly Commended, then grossly flattering the competition organiser in the second paragraph is no bad strategy either.

"A blog post, 500 words at most, which is helpful, interesting or illuminating for other writers".

The temptation is simply to provide a link to emmadarwin.typepad.com and add no more than a perfunctory "what she said".

But that would be cheating.

OK then.

Something helpful:

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Internal monologues, streams of consciousness? Willaim Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce famously used them. I adore them. Some people hate them. What about you?

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